Sarah Allison, In Defense of Reading Reductively

5:15 pm, Thursday, April 12, 2018

Class of ‘55 Room, Van Pelt Library, University of Pennsylvania

P19 is pleased to announce our Spring Lecture, presented in collaboration with Penn’s Price Lab for Digital Humanities and the Penn English Department’s ResVic Reading Group.

Drawing on materials from her forthcoming book by the same name, Sarah Allison will sketch out the narrative of how “reductive reading” grew out of the intersection of her training as a scholar in Victorian literature and as a researcher using DH methods. The second part of the talk opens up to a discussion of the larger project, which takes up the strain of studying Victorian moralizing from two very different perspectives: the reductive, explicit hermeneutic necessary for work with the Stanford Literary Lab and the imperative to attend to discursive context and subtle textual variance that characterizes traditional literary criticism.

Sarah Allison is an Assistant Professor of English at Loyola University New Orleans and the author of Reductive Reading: A Syntax of Victorian Moralizing (forthcoming from Johns Hopkins University Press in July 2018). A co-author of three pamphlets of the Stanford Literary Lab, collected in Canon/Archive (n+1 books, 2017), her work has also appeared in Cultural Analytics, ELH, and Genre.

Questions? Contact Rachel Sagner Buurma at rbuurma1 at swarthmore.edu, Kate Thomas at kthomas at brynmawr.edu, or Talissa Ford at talissa at temple.edu

These lectures are made possible by the support of a Swarthmore, Bryn Mawr, and Haverford College Mellon Foundation grant, by the Center for the Humanities at Temple University, by Penn’s Price Lab for Digital Humanities, and by the Penn English Department’s ResVic Reading Group. Special thanks to the Van Pelt Library at the University of Pennsylvania for hosting us in the Class of ‘55 Room.